PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency has found no errors that would undermine the main conclusions in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on possible future regional impacts of climate change. However, in some instances the foundations for the summary statements should have been made more transparent. The PBL believes that the IPCC should invest more in quality control in order to prevent mistakes and shortcomings, to the extent possible.

Let's just pause for a moment to consider what's at stake here. According to the IPCC's projections – not even predictions, mark you, just projections based on deeply unreliable, garbage-in-garbage-out computer models – the world is on course for a period of catastrophic, unprecedented, man-made global warming which can only be prevented by drastically cutting carbon emissions and destroying the global economy. This will cost us all at least $45 trillion and prolong the recession indefinitely. And an official Dutch investigation now finds that this is all fair and proper and right, even though none of these "projections" is remotely grounded in empirical observation, though the link between the trace gas CO2 and catastrophic global warming remains no more than theoretical, and though the Climategate emails revealed that those scientists most close to the heart of the IPCC process are at best unreliable and incompetent, at worst corrupt, fraudulent and more interested in political activism than in honest science.

So instead, for the truth, we have to rely on those traditional bastions of openness the Chinese. Says World Climate Report:

We constantly hear that the warmest years on record have all occurred in the most recent decades, and of course, we are led to believe this must be a result of the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases. In most places, we have approximately 100 years of reliable temperature records, and we wonder if the warmth of the most recent decades is unusual, part of some cyclical behavior of the climate system, or a warm-up on the heels of a cold period at the beginning of the record. A recent article in Geophysical Research Letters has an intriguing title suggesting a 2,000 year temperature record now exists for China – we definitely wanted to see these results of this one.

The article was authored by six scientists with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, the State University of New York at Albany, and Germany’s Justus-Liebig University in Giessen; the research was funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the United States Department of Energy. In their abstract, Ge et al. tell us “The analysis also indicates that the warming during the 10–14th centuries in some regions might be comparable in magnitude to the warming of the last few decades of the 20th century.” From the outset, we knew we would welcome the results from any long-term reconstruction of regional temperatures.

What this Chinese-led team has done, in other words, has confirmed the existence of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). This is the balmy period between about 950 and 1250 when Greenland was green and grapes grew in Northern England which Michael Mann tried to erase in his discredited Hockey Stick chart because it didn't suit his conviction that late 20th century global warming was dramatic and unprecedented. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

The report concludes:

The warming level in the last decades of the 20th century is
unprecedented compared with the recent 500 years. However, comparing with the temperature variation over the past 2000 years, the warming during the last decades of the 20th century is only apparent in the TB region, where no other comparable warming peak occurred. For the regions of NE and CE, the warming peaks during 900s–1300s are higher than that of the late 20th century, though connected with relatively large uncertainties.

The late 20th century global warming that started the massive AGW scare in other words is, put into its correct historical context, entirely normal and nothing to worry about. Now please can we sack Chris Huhne, save ourselves £18 billion a year we're spending to implement the Climate Change Act, and stop building those ruddy useless windfarms?